José Andrés and Bazaar Meat Raise the Steaks at SLS Las Vegas

by Andy Wang

on 08/25/14 at 12:02 PM

Chef José Andrés is going H•A•M at Bazaar Meat.

The SLS Las Vegas grand opening started at 7 p.m. on Friday. By 7:05 p.m., famous poker pro Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari had already somehow appeared out of nowhere at Bazaar Meat and planted himself in front of the station serving chef José Andrés' "Asian tacos": ibérico ham, tobiko and seaweed. Esfandiari, known for winning $18 million in one World Series tournament and also known for being a serious food enthusiast when he's not doing card tricks, had seconds before any other guest in the building realized what was going on here. Magic indeed.

Bazaar Meat, a new concept for Andrés, was born because every casino in Vegas knows it needs to have a steakhouse. But the Spanish chef had no desire to open a typical steakhouse.

Yes, there are big, thick bone-in ribeyes (which started at $50 per pound during dinner service the night after the grand opening) to satisfy all your cote du boeuf dreams here, but Bazaar Meat also has whole suckling pigs ($520), three-pound lamb shoulders ($110), Catalan-style pork sausages, foie gras cotton candy (you can't get foie gras at SLS Beverly Hills or anywhere else in California) and “bagel and lox” cones with salmon roe and cream cheese.

At the grand opening, guests took selfies in front of the 600-degree oven and ate spherical olives, steak, beef tartare, suckling-pig sandwiches and "Jose's Burgers" with ibérico ham. Over in the private dining room with a raw bar and seafood station that serves the entire restaurant, cooks offered clams and crudo to in-the-know VIP guests like Miami chef Michael Schwartz of Michael's Genuine Food & Drink and New York restaurant/nightlife moguls Eugene Remm and Mark Birnbaum of Catch. And the display of gigantic spot prawns, sea urchin, live scallops, toro and so much more made it clear that Andres' ambitions here go well beyond meat.

It's still so early, of course, and the menu is in progress. But it's safe to bet that deep-pocketed crustacean fanatics who ball out at the incomparable Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare at Wynn Las Vegas and at Estiatorio Milos at the Cosmopolitan will want to at least give Bazaar Meat a try.

In June, I met with Andrés at SLS Beverly Hills and he showed me images on his phone of whole pigs in a gargantuan oven he had at his Washington D.C. home. I asked how he built the oven, and the chef smiled slyly, like he often does.

“Anything is possible,” he said.

We ate this $35 order of spot prawns at Bazaar Meat's Bar Centro on Saturday.

On Friday, Andrés was dancing and happily screaming all over SLS, in a casino-hotel eight years in the making that had stalled during the economic meltdown before being resurrected and then opening on budget and a week before its Labor Day Weekend goal. SLS creator Sam Nazarian and a team that includes culinary director Andrés, Philippe Starck and Lenny Kravitz had defied the odds. The last time a new casino debuted on the Vegas Strip was the Cosmopolitan in December 2010, and Andrés was there, too, doing bumps of caviar off his arm when he wasn't cooking at Jaleo and China Poblano. Now he has two restaurants at SLS: Bazaar Meat and another new concept, casual Asian joint Ku Noodle.

SLS and the Cosmopolitan have a lot in common. Both cater to cool LA/New York party crowds and both offer a serious collection of restaurants. Both have gone through their struggles, and there was doubt about whether either would ever open. But what many worried was the end turned out to be just the beginning.

Vegas is on pace to bring in more than 41 million tourists this year. That would far surpass the record 39.7 million that came in 2012. New Strip properties are in the works from developers like Asian behemoth Genting and Australia's formidable Crown Resorts, which has tapped former Wynn executive Andrew Pascal to run things.

We saw Pascal at SLS, doublefisting sausages at the Umami Burger beer garden like the boss that he is. It was 11:50 p.m., a few minutes before fireworks would officially open the property to the public. While many hung out at the Foxtail pool (where Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora had performed earlier) to see the pyrotechnics, other partygoers were leaving Bazaar Meat to go into the adjacent Life nightclub. This was just the start for Andrés and the 3,400 employees at the Strip's newest casino. Andrés was amped, ready to go H•A•M. Time to get to work and make magic happen.